Dynamic Nonsense: Deleuze, Futurism and Linguistic Materiality
Helen Palmer
Introduction: word and thing
This article is a discussion of Deleuze’s manipulation of a linguistic paradox derived from pre-Socratic philosophy and viewed through the eyes of ‘nonsensical’ thinkers Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud. This is Deleuze’s project in his book The Logic of Sense (1969). Within the paradoxical duality set up, there is the interpenetration or co-presence of language as Idea and language as material object. This article discusses Deleuze’s attitude towards the overpowering of ideality by materiality through the processes of violence and speed in language, which are celebrated in Futurist manifestos. It is part of a larger thesis which uses manifestos of the avant-garde to draw out particular linguistic processes in Deleuze’s writing and interrogate the gap between his concepts and their articulation.
Deleuze uses paradox as a dynamic tool within his system of language, which results in nonsense and sense being ‘co-present’.[i] It is not that sense and nonsense are the same thing; rather, Deleuze takes us to a place where that distinction no longer has any relevance. Amongst other things, The Logic of Sense is a celebration of structuralist arbitrariness. What Deleuze calls ‘sense’ is the boundary between propositions and things; it is, in a sense, his word for language itself. Deleuze starts from the premise that something which may not have meaning may be able to give meaning, presenting nonsense as that which makes or motivates sense. Paradox is both his starting point and his mode of progression, an approach which Deleuze develops from Stoic philosophy. The fundamental Stoic linguistic paradox is vital for Deleuze in The Logic of Sense: this paradox states that language is both word and thing. Now what Deleuze does in Logic of Sense is to produce a whole system which operates between, through, and around this paradox. The philosophy of the Stoics was both materialist and cosmological, in which God as a material force permeates the entire world.[ii] The linguistic system of the Stoa consists of the phonē, the noise or cry; when articulated this becomes lexis, speech[iii]. Signifier and signified are both physical entities. What is left in the middle is the lekton, the sense or ‘sayable’, which only has subsistence. This is Deleuze’s ‘sense’, itself incorporeal and neutral, which subsides precisely at the boundary between word and thing. This boundary is what he calls the ‘surface’. Deleuze presents Lewis Carroll as a figure who manipulates this paradox and operates exactly at the boundary between word and thing. Whilst he always maintains that ‘wordness’ and ‘thingness’ are co-present and both important, what follows is a discussion of what happens when the balance tips too far over into ‘thingness’ in his writing: what happens, I will argue, is a typically ‘avant-garde’ foregrounding of the materiality of language.
Carroll’s nonsense; Artaud’s nonsense
The importance of matter is present in Stoic thoughts on both language and philosophy. Deleuze asks in The Logic of Sense, ‘What is more serious: to speak of food or to eat words?’ In Alice in Wonderland the game is always one of slipping in between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Spoken words may go awry and become things, food gets up and walks around, humans and creatures are reduced to playing cards or are eaten. Everything happens at the boundary between things and propositions. Deleuze describes language as operating through two series of ‘semiological and alimentary orality’.[iv] In Deleuze’s writing, however, philosophy itself also makes use of this duality. His own deployment of the alimentary-expressive duality is a development of this linguistic formation; rather than simply linguistic expression equated with material ingestion or excretion, philosophical concepts themselves are created and exhibit their own materiality. The most famous Stoic paradox is from Chrysippus, who said: ‘If you say something, it passes through your lips; so if you say ‘chariot’, a chariot passes through your lips’.[v] Deleuze’s remark on this is to say: ‘Here is a use of paradox the only equivalents of which are to be found in Zen Buddhism on one hand and in English or American nonsense on the other’.[vi] As we sill see in the following discussion, when the sense of language dissolves its material properties become intensified. It becomes more matter than meaning; it can be used as a missile and is capable of delivering a blow, aiming to wound or maim. Philosophical concepts can also grow legs and walk or become violent and strike blows. This blow can be seen to have a positive purpose: it is an irreducible, unreadable moment of blank force when then places the receiver in the correct state of mind to become enlightened. It does not contain but rather donates meaning. This process is actually something which we see in various avant-garde movements.
In the example from Chrysippus above, the boundary between things and propositions is both the mouth which performs the saying (which is also a creation in a very material sense), as well as the entire frontier-line of language. Lewis Carroll’s nonsense words discussed in Logic of Sense are placed in conventional grammar and syntax; as with much Victorian literary nonsense, Carroll’s neologisms rely on the strict rules of grammar to uphold their ‘meaning’. Deleuze’s term for neologism in Logic of Sense is the ‘esoteric word’. It is one unequal part of the paradoxical element which motivates Deleuze’s entire Stoic system, the other part being the ‘exoteric object’. So the esoteric word and the exoteric object are the word and the thing, although their meanings are unstable and undetermined. Through Carroll’s inventions Deleuze distinguishes three types of esoteric word:
- contracting words in which the sense is squeezed from several lexemes into one; for example ‘your royal highness’ becomes ‘Y’reince’
- circulating words in which two heterogeneous propositions or dimensions of propositions are conjoined so his creature ‘Snark’ is an example of this; and
- disjunctive or portmanteau words which only occur when two heterogeneous series are conjoined with a disjunction between them, such as ‘frumious’.[vii]
According to Deleuze, then, Carroll’s typology or ‘logic’ of nonsense is structured and categorised. It isn’t alogical; it rather follows an alternative logical framework or typology which Deleuze sets out. In contrast, Artaudian or schizophrenic language is matter to such an extent that it can affect the body. For Artaud, the materiality of language is such that plosives are sharp and can pierce the body’s surface; fricatives are rough and can flay it. Still using frameworks developed from the Stoics, Deleuze discusses these extremes of language in which it becomes wholly tonic or wholly consonantal, represented by ‘passion’ and ‘action’. Passion-words have all their phonetic elements removed; action-words have all their tonic elements removed. This type of nonsense is not a mere convergence of signifier and signified: these two series no longer exist. The difference between Carrollian and Artaudian nonsense lies in the location of the nonsense: Deleuze describes Carroll’s as being ‘emitted at the surface’, and the Artaud’s as ‘carved into the depth of bodies’. Artaud’s nonsense is so material it has the power to wound and main. Some avant-garde manifestos were published on rough sackcloth or sandpaper, the presence of this abrasive raw material foregrounding its existence as a problematic thing or object rather than a collection of words with coherent meaning. Everything about schizophrenic language for Deleuze is physical and material. Everything is literalised. If we think back to Chrysippus the Stoic, who says, ‘If you say something it passes through your lips; if you say ‘chariot’ a chariot passes through your lips’, this would be particularly resonant for the schizophrenic, for whom the word becomes the thing. Deleuze’s position here is ambiguous: at one point he writes of the Artaudian schemata that he recognises it with ‘horror’ as schizophrenia, whereas at other points he praises Artaud’s genius. Between Carroll and Artaud, however, it is clear whose language Deleuze prefers; despite the fact that the surface is where his entire logic of sense is located, he maintains that he ‘would not give a page of Artaud for all of Carroll’.[viii]
Artaud translating Carroll
We have in Artaud’s translation of Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ a potential example of the translation of neologisms, but the point here is the way in which Artaud deviates. Any attempt to translate material such as this is always going to provoke questions regarding the impossibility of translation, especially when the word is polysemous or nonsensical in its own language. Artaud’s translation, however, does not make use of the ‘sense’ of Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ as its backbone. The third of his five-line fragment entitled ‘tentative antigrammaticale contre Lewis Carroll’ is an addition to the four lines of Carroll’s poem:
Il était Roparant, et les Vliqueux tarands
Allaient en gibroyant et en brimbulkdriquant
Jusque-là où la rourghe est à rouarghe à ramgmbde et rangmbde à rouarghambde:
Tous les falomitards étaient les chats-huants
Et les Ghoré Uk'hatis dans le Grabugeument.[ix]
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.[x]
As we can see above, we cannot find in the line ‘Jusque-là où la rourghe est à rouarghe à ramgmbde et rangmbde à rouarghambde’ even a faint derivation in Carroll: it is something completely new. Instead, in this line Artaud focuses on something entirely separate from content, even ‘nonsensical’ content. Instead, more and more fricative consonants are added to the words and he begins to produce what Deleuze calls language without articulation: where consonants are fused together and liquidized, words become palatized, so what it becomes is little more than a gurgle, a breath or a howl. Rather than materiality, this line appears to change state and edge towards liquidity; an unchecked flow of sound or breath which becomes almost impossible to call language.
Futurism
If we view nonsense as the enactment of dynamic linguistic materiality, the two types of nonsense proposed by Deleuze and represented by Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud exhibit varying degrees of this materiality. As we stated at the beginning, a foregrounding of language’s materiality is typical of an avant-garde perspective on language. The fact that Jean-Jacques Lecercle describes Deleuze’s aesthetics as ‘avant-garde’ is therefore an important point in Deleuze criticism.[xi] This view carries with it the belief that literature is the apex or pinnacle of language due to its boundaries being pushed or eroded: the distortion, fragmentation or deconstruction of the language is what makes it literature. How does the Stoic paradox of word and thing so celebrated by Deleuze manifest itself within avant-garde manifestos themselves? To what extent is the materiality of language exhibited whilst it is being championed? If we view Deleuze’s writings on language as linguistic or literary manifestos in their own right, the question to be asked of them is to what extent they enact the theories they propose. The progression away from referential meaning is present to varying degrees in all avant-garde movements but it is in the futurist manifestos where the performativity of material concepts such as violence and speed shares some interesting poits of convergence with Deleuze’s system in The Logic of Sense. In Marinetti’s ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ he introduces and argues for an ‘ever-vaster gradation of analogies’.[xii] This gradation is none other than the progression away from meaning and towards materiality: the progression towards nonsense. The vaster the gradation of analogies becomes, the further away it moves from its referent and the closer it edges towards nonsense. When Marinetti talks about the need to renounce first terms of analogies and ‘render no more than an uninterrupted sequence of second terms’, he is arguing for nonsense itself. This is what Marinetti describes as the ‘imagination without strings’. If the first terms are renounced, the analogy has become entirely severed from its referent and is free to attach itself to anything.
Speed and violence
The avant-garde preoccupation with speed is understandable due to its eternal task of creating anew. Furthermore the importance of speed can be seen clearly in the ‘impatience’ of the manifesto as a genre, which must make its demand loudly and urgently so as to be heard and followed. Whilst the rapidity of the communication of ideas or demands is palpable throughout most avant-garde manifestos, the conceptual glorification of speed reaches its apex in Italian futurism. Marinetti’s glorification of dynamism is one of the most striking things in the first futurist manifesto, declaring: ‘We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed’. In a movement concerned with an eternal forward propulsion into the future, the ‘beauty’ of speed is of the utmost importance. Speed too is linked to materiality: it is significant that a fast-moving object (the racing car) is preferred to a piece of classical art (the Victory of Samothrace). It’s important to remember however that speed for the Italian futurists is never far away from destruction; the two are linked. This is evident from the descriptions of literature from before the futurist movement and literature after. Whilst the literature of ‘before’ is described in terms of ‘pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep’, the literature of ‘now’ is described as ‘aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap’. Speed is competitive: everything is a race. Perhaps the most iconic of speed-related disasters to do with modernity is the car crash. Marinetti begins his manifesto with a description of a crazed drive through the streets at night which results in him driving his car into a ditch. Rather than lamented this crash is celebrated, and the damaged car miraculously recovers: ‘We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins’.[xiii] In the manifesto the speed of the car and the speed of the language cannot really be separated; these descriptions both result in violent and paradoxical destruction of their forms which Marinetti cannot explain or account for. This is just one of many areas where the Italian futurist project and its fascistic aesthetic encounter serious problems.
Deleuze’s version of the futurist progression towards linguistic materiality is rendered in several different ways. Before we consider this, it may be helpful to identify one important strand of the multi-textured link between futurist ‘nonsense’ and Deleuzean ‘nonsense’. It has been argued that nothing in the language of futurist poetry reaches the utopian levels of the manifestos, perhaps because this level is impossible to reach.[xiv] In general, the shared view between the futurists and Deleuze is that nonsense as productive of new meaning, but the most important common ground is the fact that in both areas, the conceptual outlining of the nonsense usurps its practical deployment. In terms of speed, however, it is palpable in Deleuze’s writing that something experientially rapid is happening whilst he describes the speed of language. His manifesto-for-speed performs itself to a certain degree, but his perspective on speed is not immediately clear. Deleuze takes through the steps of denotation, manifestation and signification in the proposition before rejecting them in favour of sense, each step is insufficient for the same reason: it fails in its aspiration to ideality, always hurtling back towards matter:
It is therefore easy to ask Plato to follow down the path which he claimed to have made us climb. Each time we are asked about a signification, we respond with a designation and a pure “monstration.” And, in order to persuade the spectator that it is not a question of a simple “example”, that Plato’s example was poorly posed, we are going to imitate what is designated, we are going to eat what is mimicked, we will shatter what is shown.[xv]
Language’s demand for a Platonic idea always results in the production of some instantaneous and arbitrary object. The speed under discussion applies to a simultaneous ascent and descent: an ascent towards the phantom of the referent and a descent towards the materiality of the language. In the desperate attempt to get closer to the thing itself we grab onto something else entirely. It doesn’t matter what we hold onto. One word will do as well or as ill as another. But who is this ‘we’? This inclusive pronoun ‘we’, common to the manifesto, implicates everyone involved in this process from author to reader. Why does he describe his process in this particular way, as a collective statement of intent? He goes on to enumerate the specific way in which this process must be carried out, which is where speed is introduced:
The important thing is to do it quickly: to find quickly something to designate, to eat, to break, which would replace the signification (the Idea) that you have been invited to look for. All the faster and better since there is no resemblance (nor should there be one) between what one points out and what one has been asked.[xvi]
The collective statement of intent has shifted to an instruction or command: this passage is built around the imperative ‘do it quickly’. This is odd when considering the fact that Deleuze is supposedly outlining the way in which language works. What effect is intended or gained by describing this detail of speed in the form of an imperative? The assumption is surely that this process is always already at work everywhere in language. How performative, then, is this passage? How quickly do we read it? The listing of ‘to designate, to eat, to break’ and the separation of these items by commas produces the effect of acceleration: the list bypasses syntax, following exactly the program outlined by Marinetti in his Technical Manifesto. The repetition of ‘quickly’ also accentuates the sense of urgency, as does the placing of the comparatives ‘faster’ and ‘better’ next to one another. There are other examples of lists in the same paragraph, all describing the various ways in which language moves away from the ideal into the material, ‘substituting designations, monstrations, consumptions, and pure destructions for significations’. It would appear that Deleuze’s attitude towards the system he is outlining is highly ambivalent at this point. One minute it seems as though he is urging that ‘we’ enact the process of signification or denotation as quickly as possible. It soon becomes clear, however, that this is only another rhetorical trick as he then rejects the process which he has just outlined. It is as though this is the ‘wrong’ kind of materiality; the wrong kind of nonsense. Ambivalence, then, is not merely an unintentional by-product of Deleuze’s expression; it is in fact vital for comprehending his theory. The descent must become simultaneously an ascent; we are taken from the depths back up to the surface where the ‘right’ kind of nonsense resides:
Is there any way out? By the same movement with which language falls from the heights and then plunges below, we must be led back to the surface where there is no longer anything to denote or even to signify, but where pure sense is produced. It is produced in its essential relation to a third element, this time the nonsense of the surface. Once again, what matters here is to act quickly, what matters is speed.
To get to the surface where sense and nonsense reside we are subjected to a bidirectional breakneck hurtling: Deleuze takes us by the hand and pulls us in opposite directions at the same time. This is the very process of an immanentization of language, but in fact it is the constant process of ‘immanentization’ which Deleuze celebrates rather than an end point of a state of linguistic ‘immanence’. The fact that the two halves of Deleuze’s paradoxical ‘element’ are unequal result in the state of linguistic equilibrium or immanence being impossible to reach. He describes the event of language as a ‘battle’: a struggle between word and thing taking place within the incorporeal, infinitesimal surface of sense. Language rushes towards its ideality at the same time as it hurtles towards its materiality, and this ambivalence mirrors Deleuze’s own ambivalent attitude to his own system. He uses the example of running very fast to stay in the same place. [xvii] This paradoxical action is something which resounds not with futility but affirmation in Deleuze; it is the working of his linguistic machine. It is important to remember, however, that the entirety of the passages quoted above, and the entirety of The Logic of Sense, exists on a plane several steps closer to referential meaning than the frontiers of sense and nonsense that Deleuze promotes. The status of Deleuze’s writings on language as ‘manifestos’ is linked to their temporality, and their particular placing at a juncture between two ‘states’ of language which require different forms of time. Again, Deleuze outlines his own ‘avant-garde’ form of time in the distinction between the present of Chronos and the combination of all pasts and futures in the Aion, but the syntactical arrangement of his prose cannot uphold or perform this. This is why his writings are manifestos for a ‘Deleuzian’ poetics of the future rather than examples in their own right.
Conclusion: performativity and pragmatics
Having looked at ‘word’ and ‘thing’, I believe we can view Deleuze’s later writings on language with Guattari as a manifestation of a slightly altered paradox: rather than word and thing, they outline word and deed. According to Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, an utterance is nothing outside of the circumstances which make it performative, but equally they point out that pragmatics does not simply mean circumstance or context. A circumstance in which a piece of language occurs for them is an incorporeal transformation itself: pragmatics therefore ‘brings to light variables of expression or of enunciation that are so many reasons for language not to close itself off.’[xviii] In other words, Deleuze and Guattari appear to be re-politicizing language from a structuralist position, arguing against autonomous formalist linguistics and inserting everything ‘outside’ of language back in. This position is encapsulated in their concept of the order-word, which stretches the notion of performativity to its limit. The order-word is an important link between Deleuze’s mystical, almost shamanistic structuralism at the stage of The Logic of Sense and the more politically engaged ‘pragmatics’ he produced with Guattari.
The order-word is the relation of every word or statement to a collection of implicit presuppositions, thereby uniting language eternally with context and circumstance. It is also, however, described as ‘meduimistic, glossolalic, or zenoglossalic’.[xix] This description suggests that the most natural state of the order-word may in fact be neologism, with each nonsensical word acting as a portal to another world or dimension. This conception of the order-word would appear to encompass both types of linguistic ‘edge’: the edge where language disappears into itself and becomes the sum of its material properties, and the edge where language merges with its exterior spatio-temporal location. The merging of these would indeed be glossolalia, speaking-in-tongues or what Derrida calls the deconstruction of Babel: universal language. This linguistic ideal would bypass all structuralist or semiotic channels. The Russian futurist Kruchenykh describes his zaum language as a ‘universal poetic language’ which allows for fuller expression because it is not frozen in concepts which have already been established.[xx] This is translated from the Russian as ‘transreason’, ‘beyond the mind’ or ‘beyonsense’. Glossolalia is where the absolute materiality of language meets its opposite, and where these impossible edges of both Deleuzian and avant-garde language reach absolute transcendence.
Bibliography
Artaud, Antonin. ‘L’Arve et l’Aume: tentative antigrammaticale contre Lewis Carroll’, quoted by Henri P.arisot in Carroll, Lewis. De l'autre coté du miroir et ce qu'Alice y trouva. Roman traduit de l'anglais par Henri Parisot (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont ,1989).
Carroll, Lewis. ‘Jabberwocky’ in Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Cosimo, 2010).
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Notes
[i] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2001), p.132
[ii] John Sellars, Stoicism (Chesham: Acumen, 2006), p.3
[iii] John Sellars, Stoicism (Chesham: Acumen, 2006), p.61
[iv] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continum, 2001), p.53
[v] Diogenes Laertes Lives of Eminent Philosophers vol II trans. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1925), p.295-97
[vi] Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004), p.11
[vii] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004), 55
[viii] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004), pp.96-105
[ix] Quoted by Henri Parisot in Carroll, Lewis. De l'autre coté du miroir et ce qu'Alice y trouva. Roman traduit de l'anglais par Henri Parisot (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont ,1989)
[x] Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’, in Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Cosimo, 2010), p.10
[xi] Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p.30
[xii] F.T. Marinetti, Selected Writings ed. R.W.Flint (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1972), pp.84-89
[xiii] F.T. Marinetti, Selected Writings ed. R.W.Flint (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1972), pp.40-44
[xiv] Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp.80-115
[xv] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), p.154
[xvi] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), p.154
[xvii] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), p.204
[xviii] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004)
[xix] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateuas, p. 94
[xx] A. Kruchenykh, ‘Declaration of Transrational Language’, Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes 1912-1918 trans. and ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Washington: New academia Publishing, 2005), p.183